Secure Neighbor Position Discovery in VANETs

Many significant functionalities of Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) require that nodes have knowledge of the positions of other vehicles, and notably of those within communication range. However, adversarial nodes could provide false position information or disrupt the acquisition of such information. Thus, in VANETs, the discovery of neighbor positions should be performed in a secure manner. In spite of a multitude of security protocols in the literature, there is no secure discovery protocol for neighbors positions. The authors address this problem in their paper: they design a distributed protocol that relies solely on information exchange among one-hop neighbors, they analyze its security properties in presence of one or multiple adversaries, and they evaluate its performance in a VANET environment using realistic mobility traces.